wind and rousing sea, the healthy
sun at length dawned on the Sunday of our arrival at Saint Vincent.
Sunday, without the voice of church bells or the sight of people going to
worship, seemed no Sunday despite its idle hours: at least, the mood
sometimes took me so.

The third engineer was acquiring no mean name as a cutter of hair, and I
felt the cold after I had been to his open-air chair, near the engine-room
staircase. While I sat to him, a characteristic of the mess-room boy was
borne on the air from the chief's room. It was his habit of replying
hastily to any observation, "Yes, yes," and this time the chief's voice
was heard: "Curse you, John, for a blasted nuisance." "Yes, yes, sir."

As the sun was stooping under the sea once more, land grew into sight
far ahead; mountain or cloud? The mountainous coast was mocked indeed
by great continents of cloud above, of its own grey hue. The wind blew
hard, but at ten o'clock we were running in under the rocky pinnacles
of Saint Vincent, against the blustering wind and the black racing sea. A
light or two, chiefly from other steamers, told something of the port. The
crescent moon, cloaked in a circling golden mist, was now near setting.
We anchored and spent the night in quiet.

A mile or so from our anchorage, in the morning's clear air, huddled
the pink unsightly little town. At distance the heights of rock looked
as unsubstantial as Prospero's magic; the clouds that swam over them and
across their steeps might have been solid, so phantasmal were those
rocks. Not so with the stony masses overpeering the town; those in their
iron-brown nakedness had the aspect of eternal immobility. The air
was cold and lucent; the water halcyon blue. Several tramps with rusty
black and red, and a sailing ship or two, lay around the _Bonadventure_;
barges of a rough old make clustered closer in to shore.

The invasion by natives began early. A dozen boats were tossing on the
waves alongside, with woolly heads and upward eyes seeking what or whom
they might devour, and quiet-footed rogues here and there on the decks
were trying to sell matches, cigarettes, and red bead handbags. To their
attempts, the politest answer was "No good." "No caree?" Nobody seemed
to care. Some of our firemen whose homes were here had gone ashore, with
the air of men allowing their old haunts to share their glory.

Two lighters, coppered below, bearded with dark green weed, blundered
alongside with bags of